New England Journal Of Medicine

The editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine apologized for not informing readers that it was a chemical company official who was the author of a review critical of a book that claims chemicals in the environment are responsible for an epidemic of cancers. The journal has drawn criticism on last month's review, which was written by Dr. Jerry H. Berke, the medical director of W.R. Grace--a company that has been accused of polluting.

It's never too late to quit smoking, and researchers have new data to prove it. Even at the age of 64, kicking the habit can add four years to a person's life, while quitting by age 34 can increase life expectancy by a decade, according to a study published online Wednesday by the New England Journal of Medicine. After analyzing health data from more than 200,000 Americans, researchers calculated that current smokers were three times more likely to die during the course of the study compared with people who had never smoked.

Dr. Jerome P. Kassirer, a kidney disease specialist at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston, has been selected as the new editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, the Massachusetts Medical Society announced Tuesday. Kassirer, 58, will assume his new position, one of the most influential in American medicine, in July. He succeeds Dr. Arnold S. Relman, who will retire after 14 years as the journal's editor.

Patients with heart disease or diabetes who suffer from depression as well are notoriously difficult to treat: They have more severe complications and a higher mortality rate than patients who aren't depressed. But help may be on the way. Research published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that coordinating care to manage depression and chronic illness ? together, at the same time ? produces better outcomes for patients. "Up to this point, most care management has been focused on one condition at a time," said study coauthor Dr. Elizabeth Lin, a primary-care physician and researcher with Group Health Cooperative, a nonprofit healthcare organization based in Seattle.

The New England Journal of Medicine, calling health care costs the "black hole of our economy," said the free market had created a non-system and threw its support behind global spending caps and an end to price competition. The journal proposed "a Canadian-style single-payer system to fund the delivery of health care," which it argued would be more efficient than the Administration goal of managed competition.

The newly appointed editor of the New England Journal of Medicine is pledging to divest any interest he has in pharmaceutical companies in an effort to avoid conflicts of interest. Dr. Jeffrey Drazen also said he might have made a mistake last year when he heaped praise on an asthma drug that was made by a company he was working for as a paid consultant. "We were probably a little overzealous," Drazen told the Boston Herald on Tuesday. "In the future, we'll be more careful."

If the New England Journal of Medicine has its way, Wilford Brimley may have to eat his words, the ones he uses when he exhorts us to eat Quaker Oats because "it's the right thing to do." A study published in the journal today charges that oat bran has little specific cholesterol-lowering effect. To cereal makers, who have poured millions of dollars into oat bran promotions, that's tantamount to heresy and not to be believed.

A tiff between the nation's top medical journal and an international wire service over reporters' rights to scoop the journal on its own stories threatens to unravel a tradition that controls how medical news reaches the public.

Jurors continued deliberating Friday in the latest Vioxx trial as some legal experts said Merck & Co.'s defense against thousands of similar lawsuits would be hurt by an accusation that company scientists had downplayed the pain reliever's heart attack risk. A rare "expression of concern" posted online Thursday by New England Journal of Medicine editors chastised Merck scientists for failing to report three nonfatal heart attacks among Vioxx users who were at low risk of cardiac problems.

Interest in an all but forgotten experimental AIDS drug, isoprinosine--manufacturered by Newport Pharmaceuticals International Inc. of Laguna Hills--has been renewed by the New England Journal of Medicine's decision to publish a favorable Scandinavian study of the medication. "Treatment with isoprinosine appears to delay progression to AIDS" in infected individuals, Dr.

Early detection of breast cancer improves the odds of survival; mammograms save lives, and annual exams are essential for women over 40. That has been accepted wisdom for the last 20 years, and until recently, results seemed to confirm its truth. Since regular screening became standard in the 1990s, the mortality rate for breast cancer has dropped 30% in the United States. That conventional wisdom was challenged last year when a federal task force suggested that women 50 and over should have mammograms only once every other year and that younger women need not bother at all. Now a Norwegian study published in the New England Journal of Medicine has set off another round of controversy by suggesting that the benefits of mammography are exceedingly modest.

Vaccines that protect against severe disease and death from rotavirus infections in the United States and other developed countries work nearly as well in developing countries and should be widely employed there, researchers report today in two papers in the New England Journal of Medicine. Health authorities now have "another powerful weapon" to combat the disease, Dr. Mathuram Santosham of Johns Hopkins University wrote in an editorial accompanying the studies. Widespread use of the vaccines could save more than 2 million lives over the next decade, he said.

Whether to screen men for prostate cancer has been a controversial topic for at least 20 years. Many clinicians have believed that finding a tumor early and cutting it out is the best possible way to treat prostate cancer, just as it is for most tumors. Critics of the screening have argued that many prostate tumors grow so slowly that the patient is likely to die of other causes before the tumor becomes a threat.

Jurors continued deliberating Friday in the latest Vioxx trial as some legal experts said Merck & Co.'s defense against thousands of similar lawsuits would be hurt by an accusation that company scientists had downplayed the pain reliever's heart attack risk. A rare "expression of concern" posted online Thursday by New England Journal of Medicine editors chastised Merck scientists for failing to report three nonfatal heart attacks among Vioxx users who were at low risk of cardiac problems.

For more than a decade, physician Marcia Angell served as executive editor and then editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the country's most prestigious medical journals. Under her watch, the journal published hundreds of studies of new drugs. It also published blunt editorials harshly critical of the pharmaceutical industry and the way drugs are tested and approved in the United States.

The newly appointed editor of the New England Journal of Medicine is pledging to divest any interest he has in pharmaceutical companies in an effort to avoid conflicts of interest. Dr. Jeffrey Drazen also said he might have made a mistake last year when he heaped praise on an asthma drug that was made by a company he was working for as a paid consultant. "We were probably a little overzealous," Drazen told the Boston Herald on Tuesday. "In the future, we'll be more careful."

In an unusual confrontation, the nation's most influential medical journal and the Food and Drug Administration clashed today over restrictions on silicone gel breast implants. The New England Journal of Medicine, in a strong editorial, suggested that the FDA's decision to remove silicone breast implants from the market is troubling and misguided. The FDA's April 16 decision allows patients with a medical need to receive the implants as part of a safety study.

Attacking the federal government's threat to crack down on California doctors who recommend marijuana to sick patients, a leading medical journal said today that the policy was "foolish," "hypocritical" and "inhumane." The 800-word editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine represents a dramatic endorsement by a respected mainstream medical authority of pot's clinical merits. In contrast, the American Medical Assn.

The world's most influential medical journal has admitted to an extraordinary betrayal of its own ethics, saying that nearly half of the drug reviews published since 1997 were written by researchers with undisclosed financial support from companies marketing the drugs. The New England Journal of Medicine, in an unusual internal probe published in today's edition, found that 19 out of about 40 drug therapy reviews violated its famously tough conflict-of-interest policy.

The renowned New England Journal of Medicine--the world's top-ranked medical journal and a leading voice in biomedical ethics--has apparently violated its own ethics policy numerous times in the last three years, publishing articles by researchers with drug company ties and not disclosing the potential conflicts of interest.